[Buildroot] Creating a filesystem for QEMU

[Bogdan Cristea <cristeab@gmail.com>]

On Thursday 12 November 2009 16:46:32 you wrote:
> I've just started doing the same thing myself.  After a bit of googling
> the trick I found was to ask buildroot to generate a cpio target file
> system. Start with the i386_defconfig or i686_defconfig and set
> BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_CPIO=y (or use "make menuconfig" an find the cpio
> option under the "Target file system" menu)
> 
> Making use of qemus ability to replace the bootloader you can invoke
> qemu with
>     qemu -kernel output/images/bzImage \
>          -initrd output/images/rootfs.i686.cpio
> 
     I have tried this approach, but it does not seem to work. First 
inconvenient is that rootfs.i686.cpio file is very large (600 MB) and when 
using the above command I only get a black screen from QEMU while the entire 
computer seems to be slower. 
    Lionel, suggested other approaches but till now I have no luck. Trying to 
obtain first a cloop root filesystem and then convert that to a QEMU format 
seem to work and the file size is small (3 MB), but still when using that disk 
image, QEMU is not able to recognize any root partition.
    If you have any other suggestion it would be helpful.